♫When you get caught between the Moon and Gulf Coast Texas....♫

My mind can wander off to the strangest places, especially with a day off with nothing to distract it.  I began this day linking to a political piece, which got me into, of all things, family history- or my general lack of knowing it.

I'll begin here at the same beginning (a very good place to start).  Our Congresscritter since the 2012 elections has been a South Buffalo Democrat named Brian Higgins. Good guy- helped us with a constituent service issue some years back- and one who generally follows standard party positions, but he's got some backbone. Despite running in the plainly safest D seat in Western New York (his opponent barely campaigned this time), he did take a stand earlier this year against a return to status quo politics if his party regained a House majority. In particular, he announced, in surprisingly unflattering terms, that he would oppose Nancy Pelosi's election as speaker, calling her "aloof, frenetic and misguided" (which would be a good name for a band). As recently as earlier this week, he signed a letter affirming that position. But yesterday came word that he would support her leadership in exchange for two things she'd blown him off on in the past: getting a major infrastructure bill shepherded through the House; and, this one's the one she promised him a specific leadership role on, beginning the road to Medicare For All by immediately allowing Americans 50 and older to buy in to the program.

I immediately posted my liking this idea on the Facey Thing:

The "over 50 Medicare buy-in" Higgins is getting to push makes sense. Lowering the buy-in age will provide the proof to counter the "Harry and Louise" bullshit already planned to combat the leap to Medicare for all- that Medicare expansion won't triple its cost, increase bureaucracy or kill Grandma (because these days, Grandma is as likely to be between 50 and 65 as she is older). Then with that proof, and Democratic control of all of Congress and the WH after 2020, expand it to all.

The fact that we're 59 and 62 and would immediately benefit from this while millennials would have to suck it up a couple more years? Pure coincidence;)

I'd have to look into whether I'd want to buy in while I'm still working- the devil, as always, is in the details- but it would be a godsend for Eleanor. The main reason she didn't retire this year at 62 was because her job provides low-cost health insurance for her, and if she can start getting Social Security and Medicare with comparable coverage, well,



But this has what to do about family history?, I hear you cry.

The first person to respond to my Facebook post about Brian Higgins was, well, Brian Higgins. But not my Congressperson; another one,  friend of our dear friend mayiwrite who I connected with here a few years back. I immediately commented that it was not Mister NY26 sockpuppeting a like of  himself, and that got us talking about the fun of people with the same name.

Him: My digital doppelganger, mudding up my self-googling for years

And here's where the brain went down the rabbit hole, because it reminded me of my favorite scourge, not by my exact name, but close: Try doing genealogy when you've got relatives named Arthur and there's an entire freakin town in Texas named for the one famous Arthur Stilwell you're NOT related to.

To me, the Arthur of our last name is "Uncle Arthur." Not the wacky warlocky one played by Paul Lynde, or the weird one in the Coen Brothers movie we just started watching last night, but my father's older brother. He's probably the one relative outside the immediate fam that I spent the most time with; he lived one county away with his wife ("Penny" to us, "Emma" on the gravestone they put up after rolling her rather rotund remains into the family plot, partly infringing on Mom's never-used spot out there to this day), and their two sons: Arthur Michael, and, what else?, Michael Arthur.  My uncle was a burly, mustachioed dude who always seemed to have an air of larceny about him.   I couldn't tell you what, if anything, he did for a living.  I remember the oddest things of their rambling home out in Huntington- a lot of land, and a player-piano-style organ in their finished basement.  (Or it may have been one of those horrid play-by-color jobs which Robert Klein decimated in this 70s bit.)

As for my cousins? Arthur Michael was quite a bit older- actually a few months older than Donna, and he got married around the same time our oldest sister did, to a woman named Marie but who went by Bunny.  (Yes, Bunny and Penny under the same roof.) We found his obit some time back- Arthur Michael passed in 2004 at age 58, survived then by Bunny, by his brother Michael, and by three boys, one of whom he named Arthur, because it's apparently the law.  He was in the fence business, which I hope, given my uncle's questionable history, meant he put barriers up on property lines.  Michael, my closest relative in terms of age, has remained perpetually ungoogleable, and Uncle Arthur and his other grandkids (one named Joseph, probably for the famous general we're peripherally related to, the other named Shawn) have also defied tracking, mainly because of the Real Famous Arthur.

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I've known about the Namesake of Port Arthur Texas for years- mainly out of wishing he'd never been born so I could find who I'm looking for- but I only just discovered this bio of him from someplace called the Museum of the Gulf Coast:



Arthur Edward Stilwell, the founder of Port Arthur, was born in Rochester, New York. He left home at fourteen and persuaded a family friend, George Darling, to employ him as Billiard Room Cashier of his Southern Hotel, in St. Louis, at the salary of $60 per month.

There's the first red herring. In my 30-plus years in and out of Rochester, I have never met a soul of our name, much less one I might be related to. But Artie wasn't done in Rachacha just yet:

After his father lost most of the family’s money through poor investments, Stilwell returned home.  He took the $400 left him by his grandfather, and bought a printing plant in Smith's Arcade.  Six months later Stilwell joined Williamson and Highy, stationers and law-blank printers in Rochester, as a commercial traveler (salesman).

That stationer was long departed from the Flower City by my time, and while there is, to this day, a D.F. Williamson Co. dating to 1870 here in Buffalo, its history seems unrelated, as does most of what I find when I look this shiz up.  And Smith's Arcade was at the Four Corners, currently occupied by the 60s-hideous architecture of the Four Corners Building and now home to the Monroe County Bar Association.

From there, he got into insurance, and eventually railroads, designing and constructing towns along their lines including the eponymous one in Texas which was his "planned city."  From the town's Wiki entry:

Arthur Stilwell founded the Port Arthur Channel and Dock Company to manage the port facilities. The port officially opened with the arrival of the British steamer Saint Oswald in 1899. (The ship later sank in 1915, after colliding with the French battleship Suffren during World War I.)

Are you sensing the same series of unfortunate events here that I am?  Well, they continued:

Stilwell backed every endeavor with his own funds, but he never became lastingly rich. His crowning achievement was a railroad to the Gulf which he designed, financed, and served as president of. After being forced out of his various investments, Stilwell began to write and publish books. One of his books, "Cannibals of Finance", attacked John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates, Harriman, and Thalmann, the men who forced the KCP&G (Kansas City Southern) into receivership....Stilwell’s fortunes had crumbled by the time he died at age 68.  Less than two weeks later, on October 9, 1928, his wife committed suicide. Dressed in her best clothes, she walked out the window of their 12th floor Manhattan apartment.

Hey. At least they beat having to live through the Great Depression and she didn't run into any other falling bodies on the way down:P

But the best part of Famous Arthur's bio is this:

Stilwell himself was notably unstable.  He claimed that all of his business ventures were dictated to him by voices from the spiritual world.

Now THAT, finally, gets me wondering if maybe we are related to the guy. After all,  I root for the Mets, Bills and Sabres, the misfortunes of whom can only have similar otherwordly explanations.

So maybe I'll get to reopening the genealogy books with Donna next time I visit.